In the annals of American pop history, 2008 will surely go down as a year when our nation had more-important shit to worry about. Music usually hovers around #1 in the stuff-I-care-about charts, but amid all the year's panic, turmoil, Hope®, and high-def widescreen YouTube videos of cats falling off things, it managed to slip down into the low #30s, somewhere around birdwatching and maritime law.

(If you were a critical thinker — and for both our sakes, let's hope you're not — you might be wondering how a dude who barely paid attention to music all year could honorably sustain a weekly pop-music column in a reputable paper. If you figure it out, please let me know.)

I gather that this is some kind of year-end edition and that I'm supposed to reflect on the music of the past year. Hey, what the hell? Let's do this thing. I now present a brief overview of artists we were maybe supposed to care about this year:

FLEET FOXES | I saw this album for sale at Starbucks, and I'm sure as hell not going to break the cultural embargo by listening to it. Willingly hearing or reviewing any album sold at Starbucks would be no less a political transgression than Elton John's playing Sun City during apartheid. It's unconscionable. You just don't do it.

AMADOU & MARIAM | Their latest, Welcome to Mali, currently holds the #1 spot for '08 on the review aggregator metacritic.com, and it's really no wonder: Amadou & Mariam hail from Mali, one of the poorest nations in the world. They're also blind. You would have to be a total dick to give their album a bad review. If you give Kid Rock a shitty review and his album tanks, he can just go back to Michigan and fix cars or whatever. If these guys don't make it, they have to go back to a place where they're already past their life expectancy. Buy two copies, you heartless bastard.

An interesting sidenote: when looking up Mali on Wikipedia for life-expectancy numbers, I came across a sentence that illustrates the beauty of collaborative knowledge: "Mali gained independence in 1959 with Senegal, as the Mali Federation in stick ur dick in matts butt 1959."

M.I.A. | Everyone already knows about M.I.A., so this shit is a freebie: "Paper Planes" is the lazy man's single of the year because it was easily accessible and musically unimpeachable. And I'm the lazy man, so whatever, I'll take it. Probably the laziest part about this whole affair is that we've been listening to this track since 2007, when Kala came out, but it wasn't released as a single till this year. Which means we get to squeak by on a technicality and hitch our wagon to a relic from back when we gave a shit.

TV ON THE RADIO | I'm sure these guys are pretty rad, and I'm hearing that they pulled out a barnburner this year, but I'm just never going to trust them. Pitchfork Media likes them too much, and Pitchfork is that guy from high school who just became "cool" two years ago and now he rides up to you at school on his fixed-gear bike and tries to shove his grimy iPod bud in your ear canal because you're a "music guy" and, hey, now he's a "music guy" too, and he just heard about this really dope new band on Pitchfork, and — shit, that just looped back on itself.

2008 Listravaganza! We are not at all sick of bands with animal names yet and seem to have a soft spot for Erykah Badu that we kept very hush about all year.

Winning losers Every last one of you who votes in our Best Music Poll is a treasure; but blessed are those who write-in.

The Year of the Nerd Barack Obama is many things. Dedicated senator. Devoted husband and father. Adept orator. President-elect. Nerd.

Friends of John Most people at the Middle East downstairs on December 15 probably didn’t know John Pike, the 23-year-old drummer of New York’s Ra Ra Riot who drowned on June 1.

The briefly indecent Boston Globe It was startling to see the Boston Globe ’s online edition publish a Reuters wire-service article on Monday, March 17, containing the words “fuck” and “shit.”

Bomb the Music Industry! | Scrambles To Leave or Die in Long Island (2005) and Goodbye Cool World (2006) cemented this outfit's legacy as a band-type thing too self-consciously goofy to be taken seriously.

THE BIG HURT: DIVING IN THE PR DUMPSTER | February 26, 2013 I've been dumpster diving in the PR bin, the rankest receptacle of music industry waste, and I've come up with a dripping fistful of the month's hottest garbage.

THE BIG HURT: LEANIN' WITH BIEBS | February 20, 2013 Bieber was allegedly photographed sipping something from a double Styrofoam cup, in close proximity to a big bottle of codeine cough syrup. This can only add up to one thing: lean . That purple drank, the laudanum of Screw, the deadly nectar of Pimp C.